Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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Mr. Stuart Blagden rang his bell.

The firm of Blagden & Stephens had their offices in King’s Bench Walk, and the names—painted in white letters—had to be searched for among other names on the jamb of a doorway. Down below, two basement windows suggested the law. They had a dustiness. They gave to any loiterer glimpses of an impressive disorder, of ancient things docketed and discarded, old law-books and documents lying upon window-sills and tables, the black bulk of a deed-box, a couple of quill pens, a coat pendent from the knob of a shutter.

An elderly clerk answered the bell.

“Oh, Soames, when Mr. Vane comes, show him straight in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Stuart Blagden sat down at his desk. It had been his father’s desk, but old Blagden was dead. It was one of those flat-topped desks, the leather black and scarred, and, being placed at right-angles to the window and slightly to one side, it gave Mr. Blagden a view of the gravelled space and the plane trees, and the cars parked in rows. He could see a black steeple topped by a gold-winged horse, but young Blagden was not looking out of the window. He had picked up a letter and was reading it.

“Thanks. I think I would prefer to make my exit alone. I shall be grateful if you will get my tailor to send me a couple of new suits.”

There were other details in the letter, but Mr. Blagden had read it before and had kept it on his desk under a letter-weight. The thing was a curious human document, restrained, formal and quite without emotion, and Stuart Blagden returned it to its place on the desk. He sat and looked out of the window. He was a tall, fair, placid man going bald; he had to put on pince-nez when he read; his blue eyes were collecting wrinkles.

But his consciousness was collecting the lights and shadows of that other life. Fifteen years, and the man had been his friend. The strange and fierce deliberation of that act, but then Vane had been one of those men who had flared in the face of anything that was mean and ugly.

Meanwhile—? The fingers of Blagden’s right hand tapped gently on the black leather of the desk as though his fingers were rapping out a string of realities, transmitting a code and setting it down in brief, blunt sentences. There had been occasions when he had visited prisons. He had visited Vane in prison.

He thought of penal punishment, the stark routine, the silence, the repression. The unlocking of cell doors at five-thirty on winter mornings, the slop-parade, breakfast—bread and margarine and porridge, chapel, a voice crying in the cage. Again—the cells, and a little meditation. Then—parade, roll-call and rub-down, work in the shops or upon the farm, parade, rub-down, cells.

Dinner. The clatter of the dinner tins being collected.

Parade, roll-call, rub-down, work, parade, cells.

Supper.

Eight p.m. and lights out. Hours of darkness and of isolation.

The rhythm of it rang in Blagden’s head like some piece of doggerel. Eena—deena, dina, do. Cells, parade, roll-call, rub-down, work, parade, roll-call, rub-down, cells. He had watched the mechanism at work, all those little clockwork figures emerging from niches, standing in ranks, marching off, and every day the routine was the same, save that on Sundays there was more official religion and exercise parades instead of work, and the blue-collar men were allowed to walk in couples and talk for half an hour. Of course there were certain ameliorations—lectures, addresses, a library, the visits of the chaplain, occasional letters, and the infirmary if you fell sick, but an ex-convict had described these favours as a few split peas chucked into an ocean of skilly.

Stuart Blagden’s fingers remained still. He was wondering how fifteen years of such an existence would have affected a fastidious and temperamental creature like Vane. Stuart Blagden had interested himself in the psychology of prison life. He knew that the successful prisoner was he who surrendered, who became a mechanism, instantly obedient to the voice of authority. It was fatal to fight. Merely physical man, cut off from adventure, the red meat of life, women, might escape into apathy, or into a kind of dreadful weak-mindedness, but what escape was there for a man with a mind? Was it possible to evolve a philosophy in prison?

He looked out of the window. He saw a man standing by the iron railings. A blue pigeon came fluttering to settle on the pavement close to him, but the man did not notice the bird. He was looking at the basement windows with their suggestion of old, forgotten things tied up in red tape. Vane.

The door opened, and the grey head of the elderly clerk appeared.

“Excuse me, sir, but if Mr. Vane calls shall I bring in that statement of accounts?”

Mr. Blagden held up a hand as though he was watching the movements of some animal and he did not want the creature disturbed. He spoke softly.

“Yes, Soames, let me have all the necessary papers.”

He saw Henry Vane’s left hand feel in the inner breast pocket of his coat. He brought out an old leather wallet, opened it, hesitated, and then slipped the wallet back into his pocket. The blue pigeon was strutting close to Vane’s feet, and the sunlight made little burrs of light on the heels of Vane’s very new shoes.